Unordered #7: Good grief

Well, its been a while. I did have another post planned, but things got sidetracked by work, then by Brexit (which made all the other stuff going on seem like a waste of time to read through my scribbles and turn them into coherent sentences, let alone try to knock it all into a vaguely shareable shape.) Then by work again. So, thats why there was no "Unordered #6", in case you were wondering.1

So...

It feels like I should at least acknowledge that the whole Brexit referendum happened. I'd quite like to ignore it, but if the point of this is "unordered thoughts", pretending that my thoughts have really revolved around much else in the last few weeks would be a bit of a lie. So, consider this one to be either a clearing of the throat before I get back to the kind of thoughts that I actually want to think about.

I think the big outpouring of emotion is over, and the grieving process seems to have come to some kind of conclusion (if thats the right word.) We've gone through the denial (how can a result that close be meaningful?), anger (stupid people, believing stupid people's stupid claims...), bargaining (lets have a petition for another referendum! Maybe the question could just be "Really? Are you sure?"), depression (I can't believe I live in a country full of stupid xenophobes...) and now some kind of acceptance (if a protracted debate about Article 50 can really be called that...)

Also, I didn't know you can embed Facebook posts. Thats fun.

(Embedding rather than just recycling simply because of the excellent first comment.)

There used to be a tradition of newspapers appending people's names with their agest (eg. "David Cameron (49)"). Shaun Ryder used to have a newspaper column where he parodied this by putting their height instead (eg. "David Cameron (6'1")") 1. Now, every mention of a politician on the BBC website seems to be appended by whether they backed Leave or Remain. I wonder how long its going to last.

I think there are two slogans that, looking back, sum up the Brexit campaign. "Take back control" is the obvious one — the 'party' line, repeated at every opportunity. Order, instead of chaos. Putting power with the UK, not with Brussels. Its a strong, simple message, very difficult to argue against in principle, but pretty meaningless when you scratch the surface and try to figure out what it actually means. ("Faceless bureocrats" is probably a close second for the meaningless rhetoric prize - more "faceless" than our home-grown bureocrats? More bureocratic than our own civil service?)The other one is the line that I suspect Michael Gove will be remembered for/will haunt him forever; "I think this country has had enough of experts".(I do also quite like "Brexit means Brexit", just for the utter meaningless of it as a phrase for a Prime Minister to say and the media to report as though it actually meant anything at all, but it doesn't quite encapsulate the emptiness of the whole campaign.)

I think the most surreal thing on the actual night of the count was seeing Lindsay Lohan's live tweeting along. But the most surreal thing in the aftermath must be this;

Yes, time in parliament was being spent discussing how the town of Kettering should respond to one of Lindsay Lohan's tweets about the results being announced. Because that, apparently, is what really matters to Kettering.

The whole idea was a stupid one in the first place. Lets have a referendum on issues that the public are qualified to make decisions on, and have an informed point of view. Would we like the shops to be open on a Sunday — how do we, as a nation, feel about the added working hours, "special" family time (unless you work in the kind of industry where you don't get "special" time, like doctors). Or the idea that we should spend billions of pounds on nuclear warheads to be patrolling the oceans, so that if a nuclear war does start and Britain gets wiped off the face of the earth, at least we can get some kind of posthumous "fuck humanity" revenge strike in. If they are going to be used in my name, I'd quite like to have a say in the matter.

Back to normal thoughts about silly internet things like Pokémon and Playstations soon.

I was trying to do a look at "why I would vote Leave (if I was going to vote Leave)", looking at the other side of the arguments; the principles of being "more democratic", "taking back control" and so on. But every argument just seemed so stupid that it felt more like a straw-man attack than an attempt to see both sides of the argument, which really wasn't the spirit of the "lets try to understand why so many people seem to feel that leaving the EU is a good idea" concept that I was trying to write. And then it became increasingly clear that it wasn't just an alarmingly large minority. All of which is now kind of academic... #sigh# ↩